00:26:43 · Eric Romo
[00:26:43] S1: Yeah. I think people thought that there was this market for this kind of TUG boat service between parts of LEO, and they thought that that was a thing. Like, if you I missed the whole SPAC thing. I don't know if you're around during the SPAC stuff. But but I I kinda got back into space, like, just after all this kinda stocks tanked. And it it was kinda like, I don't know, going to a frat party, like, but but at, 07:00 in the morning Yeah. Where it was, like, a bunch of half drunk Silo cups around, and and there's a bunch of people kinda laying on the floor. It's like, wow. I missed a really good party here, and now I maybe have to clean up. I'm not sure. But, so I so I so I all this, but I gather that in this back nonsense, there was sort of this, big pitch around how we're gonna just be moving things around LEO all the time. We're gonna be, you picking them up from one spot and dropping them off to another spot, and we're gonna be going up on transporters and tugging them around. Generally, that market has not manifested at all. There's been almost no examples of this actually getting transactions actually completed in the market, or this kind of Leo to Leo move things around. People throw in that bucket orbital debris remediation, of like, Hey, we're gonna clean up space junk. So I've got some feelings on, let's talk about Oh, wow. Things like Yeah, it's a scam, I think, largely. So look, orbital remediation could be a problem one day. Could be. It is not currently a problem. And I think there are studies you can point to on this around like, what's the probability of collision and what challenge could that cause? If there was a collision, how much economic value would be removed? There's like a long tail black swan event possibility around orbital space debris, but people show these really misleading graphics around low Earth orbit where they show like, Here's Earth, and then here's, Oh my god, look at all that junk around Earth. It's so congested. It's crazy. It's all gonna blow up and crash into each other. The reality is if you showed that at scale, you wouldn't even see the satellites because they're all so tiny. You're talking about thousands and maybe some tens of thousands of objects that are like the size of mini fridges, a lot of these.
00:28:46 · Eric Romo
And yes, like, if we put data centers there, like, maybe that starts to become a bigger problem. But right now, today, there's basically no economic value in helping solve that problem. There have been a bunch of companies, however, who have wanted to prove to investors that they are doing social good work. And so they've said, like, let me show you that I'm gonna help clean up this huge problem. And so I've made a big deal out of it. The reality is, I think, when you when you really look at the dollars and cents of it, you know, if if you could wave a wand tomorrow and say, okay. I'm gonna I'm gonna clean up the different problem. How much would that be worth? It's like tens of millions of dollars. There's this grid report that I can never find every time I remember it, but it's, I think NASA did it like five years ago or something. And it's just the economic value of cleaning up space debris is not that high. But anyway, this was one of the things in that category of like, we're gonna move stuff around. We're gonna be a tugboat. Satellite repositioning is another one of like, hey, it's in the wrong spot, so bring it in, put it somewhere else, which nobody does. So this is not a thing that happens. There are some companies that are working on life extension. That's useful in GEO where satellites are really expensive. And so therefore we should extend their life a little bit. Never gonna be useful in LEO. Not a LEO, we just replace it. It's easy to get there now. And then there's the kind of Rocket Lab SpaceX arbitrage case that I already talked about earlier. So these were all in like the tugboat category. The practical reality is that the product market fit for MIRA for a high thrust, high Delta V space vehicle is it's closer to a fighter jet than a tugboat. This is a thing that the the what Space Force wants to do with this is move really fast at some foreign actor spacecraft and characterize it. That is not a tugboat mission. That that maybe it's a speedboat. I don't know. But I don't like their boat analogies. Anyway, more like a fighter jet. And I think that couldn't be further from tugboats.
00:30:40 · Molly O'Shea
[00:30:40] S0: At the upfront summit, you gave a really good keynote on the national security advantage of being able reposition in space. I'd love for you to go deeper into that, and especially as competition between US and our adversaries just increases more and we can get into Golden Dome too, but could you just explain that a little bit further of the current state of that and why it's been so important?
00:31:03 · Eric Romo
[00:31:03] S1: It's probably useful to start by just framing up what space defense is historically. For for for most of the the existence of Space Force and our our nation's opportunities in space, it's it's been assets in space that help the warfighter on the ground. A really good example of this is GPS constellation. So GPS provides, you know, position, navigation, and timing to warfighters. It's how the air force drops precision munitions and things like that. It's also become a social good, for for the world. It's a amazing thing for, for each of us. Think I've seen estimates where it's something like a trillion dollars in economic value every year, really rely on GPS. So GPS is like the one canonical example of these assets in space that provide benefits to the warfighter underground, but we also have things the missile warning tracking layer. So if anybody shoots off an ICBM somewhere, we find out. Things like secure communications. So how do you tell somebody else that somebody shot an ICBM? So historically, we've invested, you know, tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in these assets in space, light value on the ground. They've traditionally mostly been in medium earth orbit and geostationary orbit, so not really in LEO. The thing that's happened recently is I think we've been able to rely on the fact that we didn't really need to defend those assets. So Russia was the only other country that had consistent access to space, and we had an understanding with them. Don't come near our stuff and we'll come near your stuff. That understanding may be breaking down, depending on what you read in the public news. And then China now has physicist access to space and has a massive program to essentially duplicate our launch capacity. They've got, you know, five different companies trying to be SpaceX over there that they're throwing lots and lots of money at. And that's not just for commercial purposes. It's for a lot for defense. So now and we we I think Space Force knew this this was coming when it got started, but there's this real need to actually defend those assets for the first time. And this is part of why you see Space Force's budget going from $17,000,000,000 a few years ago to now the request is for $71,000,000,000 And how you defend those assets depends on where they are.
00:33:16 · Eric Romo
So right now, a lot of action is deploying new assets in low earth orbit to where STARLINK and STARSHILD are. And the strategy for defending the assets at LEO is proliferation. So you have hundreds, if not thousands of targets for the enemy to need to take out if they're gonna cripple your capacity. And so you solve defending it by just having more things for them too. They can't take them out all of them, so just put more. The problem is that when you look at the volume of LEO compared to the volume between LEO and GEO, MEO and GEO are a million times bigger, literally a million times bigger than LEO. So if you're gonna have that same strategy of proliferation of, hey, there's always an asset somewhere around here, you'd need a million times more assets, which is just impractical. So instead you solve the defensive problem in NEO and GEO with a spacecraft that can move really rapidly from one part of that orbit to another. Okay? And so MIRROR spacecraft is really good at this at going from one part of GEO to another, because as it's really, really big, and so the in order to cover all that ground, you need to move fast. You still have those same assets that provide value to the warfighters, but now you need patrols to vend them. You need bodyguard satellites that stick around them. And what those missions typically start with is characterization of understanding what is that foreign actor asset that's out there. Because space is so big, you'll see these pictures of assets from the ground. Like a telescope will take a picture of something in space, and the picture of the thing in LEO will be this kind of like blurry thing that you can sort of mix out as a box and maybe those are solar panels. And the picture of the thing in GEO is literally like one pixel, is a dot. You just don't, I have no idea what the heck that thing And so when you see in the news, you'll see China launches X, Y, Z thing. It's headed towards geo. The reality is from the ground, we don't know what that thing is. Like, does it have robot arms? Does it have machine guns? Like, we don't know. And so the way that you figure out what is that thing and what should I do about it is you actually have to get quite close to it. And in any kind of contested environment, you probably wanna get close to it pretty quickly. And so you wanna move very rapidly from one part of TO to another.
00:35:33 · Eric Romo
So this is the part of it we we work on. And and Space Force is investing across the whole gamut. Right? They're investing in proliferating and having more and more stuff going on in LEO, and then they're investing in these defensive capabilities, in MEO and GEO.